…that, according to Absurdist Laureate Samuel Beckett, “is the natural order.” How else to take any action at all in a time when meaning has broken down? Such was Beckett’s view of his bleak post-World War II milieu. And such, again, is our own post-truth reality, at least judging from this year’s Dance in Vancouver (DIV) biennial.
Three top-tier local choreographers – Noam Gagnon of Visions Impure, Amber Funk Barton of The Response and Joshua Beamish/MOVETHECOMPANY – mounted works of great emotive force and originality on the Dance Centre stage. But, after first marvelling at their energy, control and technical panache, biennial audiences were left with plenty to think about, later. Different as they were in pacing, palette and musical score, all three works left a disturbingly dystopian aftertaste. Choose your poison:
In sheer body count, Gagnon’s Pathways led the pack: nine dancers, of which two were male. That allowed for complex geometric configurations and interlocking rhythms to the throb and spatter of Guillaume Cliché’s electronica score. Darryl Milot’s costumes – black spandex briefs and halters, kneepads and ankle socks, with a wispy fishnet overlay – initially reinforced this mechanistic imagery, with its suggestion of inanimate, rubbery gaskets and grommets.
But when the dancers “throw their gears” and break formation, a few minutes into the opening piece, the war inside, the kinky flash of the costuming shines through – the bare thighs and midriffs, the churning shoulders and tossing, unbound hair. A lot of self-stroking solos ringed by voyeuristic onlookers. Twosomes or threesomes emerge and dissolve amidst the pulsing melee. By the end of the 25-minute segment, several of the dancers apparently yearn to pair off with others across the stage, if only they were not ensnared by previous partners wrapped, squid-like, around their straining limbs.
What better time to adjourn for a quick pick-me-up drink in the downstairs lobby bar or the DIV Lounge in the Dance House top-floor Marcuse Studio? But better chug quickly and brace oneself back in place for Act Two of Pathways, ominously entitled the reckoning. It struck me as a whirlwind evolutionary recap, starting with our earliest emergence as yawping anaerobic tube worms around some sulfurous undersea fumarole.
The dancers then “progress” through human speciation, as depicted in the phony hilarity of what looks like a college Spring Break beach party (pictured above), which soon devolves into a surging group grope and then into sobbing despair. To the drumbeat of a Stefan Nazarevich audio-sample collage, all nine coalesce into some sort of witchy cauldron-stirring rite, but then fragment into antagonistic sub-tribes that peter out in a heartbreaking Anthropocene collapse. Time for another drink.
It took Gagnon a cast of nine to spell out this ontogeny/phylogeny story. Amber Funk Barton covered much of the same ground all by herself in her original work, VAST, which premiered at last year’s Vancouver International Dance Festival.
As befits such a solo tour de force, all stagecraft elements centered on Vancouver’s homegrown dancer/choreographer star. Set designer Andreas Kahre laid out a stark white circle on the black stage, mirrored in the backdrop by a foreshortened white oval adrift in a sea of black. Lighting designer Mike Inwood echoed the bullseye theme with overhead spots as well as sidelight gels and an array of what looked like tripod-mounted klieg lights, all focused on Funk Barton.
We filed in to find her already seated in meditation downstage. As the houselights dimmed, she stood up and scanned the audience, row-by-row, lingering for eye contact. Then she practically dove into the white onstage circle, only to swim back to its edge and wriggle her way out to the black periphery like some pioneering Ichthyostega’s first terrestrial venture out of the primordial ooze.
Some staggers and stumbles as she struggled to gain her land legs. But before long she was vaulting and capering, running laps around the stage. And then downstage center again to mug straight into the audience in a rapid-fire series of grins and grimaces. Which soon devolved into a bout of laugh-until-you-cry hilarity much like Vision Impure’s, but all the more unnerving when executed solo, without an interlocutor.
VAST, according to Funk Barton’s choreographer notes in the Biennial program, ponders how “despite our [human] limitations, we still…propel ourselves…into unknown territory.” So she resonates accordingly from drollery to sublimity, idiosyncrasy to universalism, gaucherie to equipoise. Even composer Marc Stewart’s original score veers from abstract electronica to disco swing and back again.
In the end, Funk Barton waded back into the white circle, hesitantly at first but with growing confidence until she wound up languidly spinning, dead center, like a serene dervish in indrawn ecstasy.
Getting on down in Saudade -- a vertical idea, horizontally expressed. Photo: Craig Foster
Ecstasy seemed hard come by for Joshua Beamish/MOVETHECOMPANY’s six male dancers, though not for want of trying. In plainclothes slacks and T-shirts and muted lighting (Mike Inwood, again, in a more subdued mood), the performers slid and sidled past one another, hookup-ready but wary. They flexed and arabesqued in kaleidoscopic formations and then broached one another “with many a flirt and flutter,” like Poe’s portentously preening Raven. Even the music takes on a somber hue in a cello-heavy score by Icelandic superstar Hildur Guðnadóttir.
Sometimes the dancers would “click” in intense – but evanescent – pas de deux. I couldn’t help thinking of my favorite game as a kid, which involved an assortment of bar magnets that would chase each other around the table, attracting or repelling, clumping together or flying apart with hypnotically mysterious force according to the shifting alignment of their poles.
Dance, according to George Bernard Shaw, is “the perpendicular expression of a horizontal idea,” but MOVETHECOMPANY, it seems, never quite got the memo. Lots of impressive floor work by the very accomplished sextet. And even when the dancers did go vertical, the grinding still went on. At one memorable moment, they stripped off their tees for a mesmeric display of topless flexion choreographed entirely for nothing but their shoulder blades.
Now and then Beamish himself circulated among the clinching couples, a stray satellite sketching eccentric epicycles in a tight-bound planetarium. These wraith-like perorations underscored the dominant mood of the work, as reflected in its title: Saudade. That, according to Beamish’s program note, is Portuguese for “the love that remains after someone is gone…to feel saudade is to feel a deep incompleteness and recognize it as familiar.”